Winning Paint Scheme

A few posts ago, I let slide that we are getting the exterior of the house ready to paint. So far, other than replacing all the windows and patching in new cedar shingles, I have removed a section of sagging gutters and rebuilt the soffit. It involved tearing off everything rotting and putting up a new fascia board and wooden soffit panel. Because it was over 90 degrees outside the day I decided to do this project, I was more concerned with getting the soffit boards replaced and the gutter back up and less concerned with taking photos for the blog. So this is not a step by step tutorial. But here is a great diagram to help you understand what pieces I had to replace.

Now we are nowhere near ready to paint (there is a large patch of wood siding on the back of the house that is quite bad and needs entirely replaced, not to mention all the hours of scraping still ahead of us) but we have made a final decision on the paint colors.

In this post debating color schemes, I showed two different paint schemes inspired from a Sherwin-Williams color book (the results would look similar to the pictures, but I tweaked the actual colors to ones I liked a little more). After this blog’s first ever reader poll, we have a winning color scheme. (You can still read a breakdown of each of the color scheme contenders in the post, You’re Invited.) Below is a photograph of a house painted with the winning color scheme.

The main color is called Portabella, by Sherwin-Williams. According to you, the readers, this color scheme won in our poll after receiving almost 78% of the votes. Truth be told, this is the color scheme I was leaning towards myself. But before I could make a final decision, I wanted to see these colors on my house, not just a house in a magazine. I hate it when I see a paint color I really like in someone else’s house and when I use it myself, I am disappointed. One color can look so different based on the shape of a room, type and amount of lighting, the color of trim, etc. So, I put my college-learned Photoshop skills to work to see exactly what the house will look like.

Here is a current photo of my house. Ignore the multiple colors of shingles around the windows or missing shingles. Combed cedar shingles are special order only, and we are still waiting for another bundle to finish around the large front window.

And here is what the house will look like once painted. (Although first it must be scraped, sanded, washed, mildew scrubbed off in spots, cracks filled with paintable silicon, … the list goes on.)

We have a weekend picked out just under a month from now when we are hoping to break out the brushes. We’ve got my grandparents lined up for lunch duty and a half dozen family members ready to sling paint. I can’t wait to get started! I just hope our lovable Ohio weather chooses to cooperate.